Thursday, February 28, 2013

Last week I told you about how I was doing a problem in roof rafters using pictures to calculate the length via similar triangles. It seems this is not the approved method. Let us continue the story where we left off...

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A student once told me there is a sheet
with 137 mathematical formulas on it, and those are all the formulas you need
to pass your carpentry exam. One of those137 formulas corresponds to the very rafter problem which I was doing
with pictures. But of course there are a dozen or so rafter types in carpentry,
which meansanother dozen or so formulas
corresponding to each of thepossible rafter
questions the students might see on an exam. For me, the idea that you would
try to calculate rafter lengths by memorizing dozens of different formulas
seems completely impractical and unnecessary because I have exactly one method
that works for every single problem: I just draw the picture and work it out
with similar triangles. But for those students who have been indoctrinated in
the method of formulas, it seems both pointless and frustrating when I insist
on doing my calculations with the help of pictures. (Murray
happens to be one of those indoctrinees. One day I was showing how to do
board-feet calculations, naturally with the help of pictures, when Murray walked right into
my class without saying a word, wrote the formula on the board behind me, and
walked out again.)

It was this clash of perspectives that precipitated
the crisis which ultimately cost me my job. I was teaching hip rafters, which
go at an angle in three dimensions. I drew my picture. The obvious way to draw
the picture, projecting the rafter into the plan view, requires anintermediate calculation, and this is how I
did it on the board. One of the “formula” students said I was doing it wrong,
so I asked him to go the board and show us how to do it. He got up and wrote a
single formula, getting the same answer as me. No pictures and no middle step.
I looked at it and saw that it was right but in that moment I somehow wasn’t
able to put it in the form of a simple picture. So I told him he was free to
use the formula if he wanted, but I preferred to keep using the method which I
understood, even with the extra step. With almost no warning, the student abruptly
announced, “This is a fucking waste of time. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
As he got up to leave, I told him he was suspended for the duration of the
class. Which was a violation of Murray’s
explicit orders to me. Which Murray
didn’t have the authority to issue in the first place since he wasn’t my boss.
Which is what I subsequenly said in my letter to my REAL
boss. Which led Murray
to accuse me of not following the curriculum. Which is where this whole story
began.

As I re-read the last few lines, I realize
that although the sequence of events makes sense, it’s not exactly the way it
happened. The truth is a little more bizarre. At the end of my class that day,
I went straight to Murray
to tell him what had happened. I found him livid with rage. Based only on the
student’s complaining to him of being kicked out of class, he had already
phoned our boss, told him that I wasn’t following the curriculum and demanded
that I be fired. His words to me were “You’ll never set foot in my classoorm
again!” And all this without even waiting to hear my side of the story! (His
exact words were “I don’t NEED to hear your side of the story.” It’s
interesting that I would hear those same words several more times in various
circumstances during my year in Thompson. Nice people you have up there.) In
any case, when I described this sequence of events in my letter to Selwin, it
frankly made Murray
look like the jackass he truly is. Murray
never forgave me for that.

And that was how Level Two ended. According
to the Ms. Henning’s letter, “Mr. Green was provided ample opportunity to
correct these issues in Level 3, but this did not happen.” And yet the only
specific example of inappropriate teaching subsequent to the Christams break
which they are able to cite in their letter of dismissal is...troubleshooting
the water heater, which took place not in Carpentry but in Facilites Tech 2! From
Level Three Carpentry the college does not present a single instance to support
its case.

Monday, February 25, 2013

When I was fired six years ago by University College of the North, the College President gave three examples of improper teaching which were basis for my dismissal: the smokestack, the water heater, and "the slope example". I've talked about the first two cases already, so today we're going to pick up the story at the point where I deal with Exhibit C.

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By now it should be clear that I offended
my fellow teachers by taking math outside the traditional classroom. These are
the incidents which stuck in their minds as being offensive long after I was
gone. Which brings us at last to Exhibit C, the one Ms Henning refers to as
“the slope example”. Just what was this?

My first inkling that “slope” was an issue
came during an absurd conversation late in January with my supervisor, who
worked out of The Pas, five hours away. On one of his infrequent visits, he
made a vague reference to problems with the way I taught slope. When I tried to
ask him what kind of problems he was talking about, he became visibly flustered
and said “slope is just an example”. Then he abruptly announced that he had no more
time to talk because there was a taxi waiting to pick him up for his return
trip to The Pas, and he rushed down the stairs and out the door! My written
follow-ups were not answered, and that was the last I heard about slope.

I’m quite sure I know now what this was all
about. Yes, I do teach slope differently. If a roof slope is 5:12, I draw a little triangle and label the
sides. Then I draw another triangle to represent the rafter. The horizontal
length is given: say, its fourteen feet. The height x is the unknown. Then,
pointing at the triangles, I recite:“Five is to x as twelve is to fourteen”; and as I say the words, I write
the formula equating the two fractions. That’s how I teach it, and the reason I
teach it that way is because for as long as I can remember, that’s how I’ve
done it myself. And the problem is that my method is quite different from the
way everyone else teaches it.

Friday, February 22, 2013

I've talked about two cases where I was written up by the College President for taking math outside the classroom. There were a few more similar instances that weren't cited in the reasons for my dismissal, but I still got in trouble for. Here are a couple of them:

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With hindsight, it’s obvious to me that my
real crime was to be different from other math teachers: different from people
who didn’t have the imagination or the knowledge to be able to do the kinds of
things that I could. From this point of view, I could finally understand, much
later, a couple of other incidents which were baffling to me at the time but
which fit into a consistent pattern of behaviour. These confrontations
involved, of all people, mild-mannered Dennis Cameron, journeyman carpenter and
Facilities Tech program co-ordinator, who literally flew into a rage on two
occasions when he encountered me out in the shop doing real-world math
exercises with my students.

One incident involved stairway
calculations. Dennis had given our students a worksheet. Every stairway has
exactly six parameters which define its dimensions: total rise, total run,
number of steps, riser height, etc. Given any three, the other three may be
calculated by plugging the numbers into certain formulas. That was the gist of
the worksheet.

At the end of the period I thought it might
be a good idea to go out into the building and measure the dimensions of an
ACTUAL staircase, to see if they agreed with what the formulas said. When
Dennis saw me doing this, he basically freaked out and ordered me back into the
classroom. It sounds crazy but that’s what happened. And it wasn’t the only
time.

A couple of months later the students were
given an assignment to draw a floor plan of the mock-up house which they had
built out in the shop. I thought we ought to start by going out to the shop and
taking measurements. Of course, the students had all kinds of trouble reading
the tape measure. But I perservered with them until Dennis came upon us.
Again...he freaked out. “Who told you to take them out here? They have the
dimensions in their notes...”. Well maybe they did and maybe they didn’t. But
was there really any reason for him to lose his temper? Except...there I was,
the math teacher, out on the shop floor again with my students. Something was
obviously very wrong with this picture, from Dennis’s perspective.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

In yesterday's installment, I told you how I was criticized by the College Presidient for an episode involving "trouble-shooting and electric circuit". When I left off, I had just started telling you how in this particular course, we were operating under a strict imperative of keeping the students enrolled at all costs, if only for the social benefits. Let us continue with the story...

In the case of Facilities Tech Level Two,
we had a further motivation for keeping our students enrolled: the numbers
game. In fact, our total enrollment consisted of exactly one student: quite a
bright young fellow actually, and incidentally not unpopular with the ladies.
But alas Pete had a weakness for the bottle. His weekends would begin
Thursday afternoon and sometimes last until Tuesday...twelve days later. Still,
we needed him more than he needed us: and don’t think he didn’t know it. In a
moment of black humor I once called him the Last Jew in Auschwitz, in
reference to the German guards who carefully protected the lives of their few
remaining charges during the final months of the war, not out of any sense of
guilt or sympathy, but simply because if the High Command found out they were
operating a concentration camp with no inmates, those guards might find
themselves suddenly unemployed and, as a consequence, liable to be sent to
the Eastern Front. Similarly, we had four instructors making a comfortable
living off young Pete Ross, but only as long as he was willing to grace us with
his presence, if only for a few days every other week or so. The point of this
digression is that in the context of Facilities Tech Level 2, in that
particular winter, the “curriculum” in the Thompson campus was simply whatever
subject matter you could use to hold Pete Ross’s attention on any given day.
And to go back after the fact and hold me as an instructor to any higher
standard makes no practical sense.

Having said all that, what exactly was my
crime? In Facilities Tech, the students work on a mock-up of a house in which
they have to, among other things, install a water heater, which involved both plumbing
and electical. I thought this would be a good topic to take a closer look at,
so I showed Pete how to draw up the circuit diagram for the controls (remember:
I was responsible for teaching math AND blueprints!), and then we did some
measurements on the actual building water heater to see if it worked the way
the control diagram said it should. How was this possibly outside the scope of
what we might teach people in a program which covers carpentry, plumbing, and
electrical? All I did was to take the student outside the classroom, into
the "real world", in an attempt to make the textbook knowledge more
meaningful.

Monday, February 18, 2013

Last time I told you how the College President game me three examples of inappropriate teaching to justify my dismissal from the Carpentry Apprenticeship program in Thompson, Manitoba:

* * * * * *

...in fact she came up with exactly three
cases, the smokestack being Exhibit A. And as an argument for my
dismissal, it is patently absurd.

Let's move on to Exhibit B: the water
heater controls. This example comes not from the Apprenticeship program but
from Level Two Facilites Tech. Now, I admit that in this program I was a little
less meticulous in following the curriculum as compared to the Apprenticeship
classes, where I knew that the students would be responsible for passing a
Provincial Exam at the end of their program. I took the Provincial Exam very
seriously: in fact, from early in the year, I made a point of meeting with Murray every single day
after my class ended to confer with him about what I had just covered and what
I ought to work on the next day. That’s how I handled the Apprenticeship course,
so if I ever veered from the curriculum you should blame Murray, not me. But as
for the Facilites Tech program, just what was the particular urgency about
following the curriculum?

No one who has not seen the social problems
among the native people of the North can completely understand what we are
dealing with in an educational setting. Many of the students who enroll in our
courses are barely functional after years of chronic alcohol abuse. It was made
clear to me that failing them was not an option: we wanted to keep them
enrolled at all costs, because we believed that one way or another the school
is providing a positive social influence. In the case of Facilities Tech Level
Two, we had a further motivation....

* * * * * * *

When we return, I'll tell you just what that "further motivation" was all about.